The populist fury aimed at President Obama and his fellow Democrats may have roots much deeper than health care. In fact, it may be that it can be traced back to the emigration of the Scots-Irish, the first white group to settle interior America.

They've been called rednecks, hillbillies and crackers. In the modern parlance of political correctness, they've been referred to as the Bubba vote. They live in Sarah Palin's "real America," and they make up the majority of Reagan Democrats. They count as distant relatives at least twelve U.S. presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and even to Barack Obama, yet the Scots-Irish remain largely ignored as an ethnic group in America.

The Scots-Irish were a group of Scots who moved to Ulster, in Northern Ireland, before moving to the U.S. and first settling in New Hampshire and parts of Maine. Within a generation, they had moved down along the Appalachian spine, from western Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio down into West Virginia, western Virginia, North Carolina, northern Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and large parts of South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. Many moved further south and west, down to the Gulf Coast and out to Oklahoma, Arkansas, East Texas and beyond. Eventually they migrated out to the Bakersfield region of California (think The Grapes of Wrath), and up the Great Plains to parts of Michigan, Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado (James Dobson and Tom Tancredo territory, not Denver and Boulder).

An analysis of Scots-Irish may help to explain why rural white voters
in many areas of the South and West often share similar viewpoints, and
why they differ from rural whites in areas like New England and the
upper Midwest in their cultural beliefs and voting patterns.

Brandeis Professor David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion's Seed,
"90 percent of the backsettlers [in Appalachia] were either English,
Irish or Scottish; and an actual majority came from Ulster, the
Scottish lowlands, and the [Scots-English] north of England...they
established in the southern highlands [of the U.S.] a cultural hegemony
that was even greater than their proportion in the population."

Only
1.5% of the U.S. population identified as Scots-Irish in the last
census, but there are many more whose origins have been lost to
history, and their influence is much stronger than their sheer numbers.
Anecdotally, country music is the direct descendant of Scots-Irish folk
music. Many Protestants who identify as Irish are likely of Scots-Irish
descent: a very high number of Irish Protestants in the 1800s were of
Scottish origins. Many Scots who came over in the early years of the
Republic are Scots-Irish as well. Finally, the 2000 Census map of the
concentration of the 7.2 percent of U.S. citizens who identify their
ethnicity as "American" in the census very closely mirrors maps of
Scots-Irish settlement patterns. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), himself a proud
Scots-Irishman, wrote in his book Born Fighting that approximately 10% of Americans, or 30 million people, are of Scots-Irish descent.

Unlike
other ethnic groups in the U.S., the Scots-Irish do not overtly
identify as an ethnic bloc in politics. As University of North Carolina
professor emeritus John Shelton Reed put it, "You ask people what their
ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if
they know it they just [don't] acknowledge it. It's not something they
really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla.
I don't think they are a self-conscious voting bloc."

Sen. Webb
argues, "Few key Democrats seem even to know that the Scots-Irish
exist, as this culture is so adamantly individualistic that it will
never overtly form into one of the many interest groups that dominate
Democratic Party politics." He blames former Vice President Al Gore's
loss in 2000 on his losses in Tennessee and West Virginia, which he
attributes to Gore's positions on gun rights.

Still, while the
Scots-Irish may not participate in the same group politics that other
ethnicities do, they still share many common cultural values that have
held on in many parts of the country, especially the Appalachian South.
Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen, psychology professors at the University
of Michigan and University of Illinois, conducted an in-depth study in
the 1990s examining what they dubbed the "Culture of Honor" prevalent
in the South. In trying to find out why violence rates were
significantly higher in the South, they discovered that white
southerners tended to be much more likely to resort to violence to
defend their property or honor than whites in other parts of the
country. Their studies controlled for poverty rates throughout the
region, as well as for other factors including weather (warmer areas
tend to be more violent) and the legacy of slavery (areas with fewer
blacks actually experienced more violence amongst whites, they found).
This trend was not nearly as strong in the larger, more metropolitan
cities of the South but was especially prevalent in the small, more
isolated and culturally distinct small cities and towns throughout
Appalachia and the rural South. These are the areas where the Hatfields
and McCoys, the Turners and Howards (all Scots-Irish) feuded for years.
The psychologists then ran a series of experiments where they
antagonized both southerners and northerners, and found that
southerners were much more prone to violence when slighted.

Nisbett
argues that many of the cultural traits of the modern South can be
traced back to the heritage of the population's descendants. "The
Scots-Irish were a herding people, while people from the north [of the
U.S.] were English, German and Dutch farmers. Herding people are tough
guys all over the world, and they are that because they have to
establish that you can't trifle with them, and if you don't do that
then you feel like you're at risk for losing your entire wealth, which
is your herd. This creates a culture of honor, and the Scots-Irish are
very much a culture of honor, and they carried that with them from the
Deep South to the Mountain South, and then out through the western
plains."

According to Nisbett, the Scots-Irish were a warlike
people distrustful of a powerful central government, a result of the
herder mentality as well as centuries of fighting, first against the
English and Irish, then against Native Americans, then against the
Yankees. As he points out, "The Scots-Irish are very much
overrepresented in the military ... and you find them there because
they're a fighting people."

The Scots-Irish also tend to be
devoutly religious. While the Scots-Irish were originally mostly
Calvinists, many are now Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination
in the U.S., while others are Pentecostals or belong to other
evangelical churches. Sen. Webb argues in his book that the "twin
forces of Calvinism and populism came together to create ... the embryo
of what would in the twentieth century be called America's Bible Belt."

The
states that are dominated by the Scots-Irish and Scots-Irish culture
have voting patterns atypical to the rest of the U.S. Voters there,
once solidly New Deal Democrats, have been voting increasingly for
Republicans at the national level since the 1960s, as the Democratic
Party has grown increasingly socially liberal and dovish. It is worth
noting that many Scots-Irish broke for George Wallace's militarism,
tough on crime message and racism before they moved on to vote for
Nixon and Reagan, although Wallace's supporters tended to be in the
Deep South and not in the parts of Central Appalachia that had
supported the Union during the Civil War. Wallace did poorly in West
Virginia, for instance.

Republicans have had success in actively
courting these voters. As Sen. Webb writes, "The GOP strategy is
heavily directed toward keeping peace with this culture, which every
four years is seduced by the siren song of guns, God, flag, opposition
to abortion and success in war."

Still, in many of these areas
Democrats have done well, at least on the local level. Arkansas, which
voted for McCain over Obama by a 59%-39% margin, still has two
Democratic senators and more Democratic than Republican House members,
as does West Virginia, where McCain beat Obama 56%-43%. Emory Professor
Merle Black: "They [southern Democrats] are moderate to conservative
Democrats, they're not liberal Democrats, and voters really see a huge
difference between national elections and state and local elections,
especially in these places like Arkansas, parts of Tennessee, Virginia,
most of western North Carolina ... when the national Democrats come in
and run very liberal programs, most of these local Democrats put some
distance between themselves and the national candidates."

These
Democrats are often Blue Dogs (and in the recent past were Boll Weevils
and Yellow Dogs), and often look and sound like Rep. Heath Shuler
(D-NC): they are pro-gun, pro-life, anti-free trade, and loudly
critical of both the national Democratic and Republican Parties.
Shuler, for instance, vehemently opposed Obama's stimulus package,
criticizing Speaker Nancy Pelosi's handling of the bill. Still, he and
other Democrats in Scots-Irish territory are high on Republican target
lists heading into 2010.

The split between Obama and Clinton in
the primaries closely mirrors the schism between Scots-Irish "Bubba
voters" and what can be called "Mondale Democrats." While Obama took
the states with high minority populations or with white voters from
mostly WASP, Scandinavian or Germanic heritage, such as in Wisconsin,
Iowa and Minnesota, Clinton won every state with a significant
Scots-Irish population and low concentrations of African American
voters. Even in Scots-Irish states like North Carolina and Virginia
where Obama easily won, the Appalachian counties broke decisively for
Clinton.

Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a self-described "Scots-Irish
hillbilly," is a former senior adviser to Sen. Webb, Sen. (then Gov.)
Mark Warner (D-VA), and former Sen. John Edwards's (D-NC) second
presidential campaign. As Saunders points out, "If you had told me in
2005 that by that time the 2008 nominating battles had come along that
Hillary Clinton would redefine herself as pro-gun and anti-trade, I
would've told them that they were crazy. But she did it -- she
redefined herself. At the same time, they redefined Barack Obama as a
globalist, 'secret meeting with the Canadians,' 'gonna take your gun
right now'... it was cultural issues" that gave Clinton the edge with
the Scots-Irish.

In the general election, while McCain was
losing voters who had gone for George W. Bush in droves across the
nation, the only regions where he outperformed Bush were the Deep South
and Appalachia. McCain easily increased Bush's margins of victories in
areas from East Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas up to West Virginia. The
only other areas where McCain routinely did better than Bush were in
his and Palin's home states, Arizona and Alaska, and in Catholic
southern Louisiana.

Democrats saw their share of the white vote
fall from 19% to 10% in Alabama and remain unchanged in Georgia despite
Obama's strong campaign operation there and John Kerry ignoring the
state in 2004. Obama also ran roughly even with or slightly trailed
Kerry's numbers in Appalachian North Carolina and Virginia, despite
campaigning heavily there as well.

John Murtha (D-PA) took a lot
of heat for his assertion before the last election that Obama would
perform poorly in Murtha's 12th district because "there's no question
western Pennsylvania is a racist area." Yet Murtha may have been
correct -- the 12th, in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, went
narrowly for McCain after both John Kerry and Al Gore had won it.

As
Saunders put it, "There ain't fifty cents' difference in a Scots-Irish
redneck up there and one down here. They want their guns, it's just who
we are. And everybody thinks of going after the Scots-Irish vote in a
geographic sense, 'Go into southern Appalachia and the South.' Listen,
you can get a lot of 'Yankee' votes with that too, and Midwestern
votes, Southwestern votes."

Black argues that racism only played
a small part in the 2008 election. "If there's a racial difference, it
may be 4 to 5 points ... the vote in '08 [from whites in the Deep
South] actually looks very much like the Reagan-Mondale vote."

Still,
that Obama won three large states in the South despite losing badly
among Scots-Irish voters indicates that Democrats may no longer need
the Scots-Irish in the same way they once did. The Southern states
where Obama won have large African American populations, as well as
large numbers of immigrants, from other parts of the U.S. as well as
from overseas. Northern Virginia, the research triangle of North
Carolina and urban and suburban Florida are populated by many
non-natives who have not been heavily influenced by the local,
Scots-Irish and Southern culture.

The Republican Party, in
wooing Scots-Irish Reagan Democrats with foreign policy and social
issues, has made them an increasingly important part of their
coalition. If Democrats want to better compete for these voters, they
need to better understand them. As Saunders stated, "There is a
definite thirst for understanding on how the Democrats might get to the
culture."

Still, even the Scots-Irish themselves might be
changing. As Nisbett put it, "I think the tectonic plates are shifting
in the South. People are becoming more cosmopolitan, and
cosmopolitanism is not consistent with most fundamentalist aspects of
the religious right or with the South. I have the suspicion that some
of the traditional culture is being reexamined in some of these
changing areas."

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